Unlock Loot and Collect Sats: Learn and Earn Bitcoin w/ Sanjna Mehta of Yzer App

Today on Halving Report, we're joined by Sanjna Mehta, the trailblazing co-founder of Yzer app, to delve into the innovative realm of Bitcoin education. Yzer is revolutionizing the way we approach learning about Bitcoin and financial literacy. Our connection with Bitcoin Zay, Isaiah Jackson, a fervent advocate of Yzer, paves the way for a deep dive into this pioneering app. Yzer distinguishes itself by incentivizing users with satoshis for their educational progress, cleverly blending knowledge acquisition with rewards.

Sanjna's bullish outlook and enthusiasm illuminate Yzer's unique strategy in making Bitcoin knowledge both accessible and engaging. A standout feature of our discussion is Yzer's distinctive game show element, infusing an element of fun and competition into the learning process. This show transcends mere discussions about Bitcoin trends; it's a vivid exploration of how Yzer is demystifying and gamifying Bitcoin education, captivating a broad audience, and enriching their financial understanding, one satoshi at a time. 🚀📚💰

🚀 SUBSCRIBE for Insightful Analysis 🚀
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Connect with Sanjna on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjna-mehta/
Follow Sanjna on Twitter for more insights: https://twitter.com/sanjna_connect

🔗 Learn More About Yzer:
Discover Yzer, the groundbreaking app on the Bitcoin Lightning Network: https://yzer.io/

[0:03] 🚀 Intro: Brad Mines on Bitcoin's status & Halving; Welcoming Sanja Mehta.
[0:19] 🎤 Guest: Sanja Mehta talks Bitcoin enthusiasm.
[0:23] 💹 Bitcoin Prices: Discussing trends and future predictions.
[1:00] 📈 Bull Market: Sanja's experiences and community excitement.
[1:23] 🌍 Public Bitcoin Interest: Impact of bull markets.
[2:24] 📱 Wiser App: Overview of features and educational goals.
[3:11] 🎓 Bitcoin Education: Engaging diverse learners.
[3:30] 👥 Tailored Learning: Connecting demographics with Bitcoin.
[5:09] 🔍 Brad's Journey: Exploring Bitcoin's technical and social sides.
[5:26] 🎓 Sanja's Background: Sociology and economics in her Bitcoin path.
[6:06] ⚡ Wiser & Lightning Network: Integration and user experience.
[7:21] 💰 Wiser Incentives: Rewarding users with Satoshis.
[8:08] 💼 Business Models: Wiser's strategies and initiatives.
[10:55] 🌏 Global Reach: Wiser's international plans.
[12:00] 📊 User Demographics: Wiser's user base and growth.
[12:34] 🔒 Wallet Tips: Sanja's wallet recommendations.
[13:30] 👕 Merchandise: Wiser's Bitcoin-themed products.
[14:32] 🔮 Future of Wiser: Upcoming features and collaborations.
[16:42] 🎉 Q&A: Rapid-fire session with Sanja.
[18:16] 👋 Closing: Sanja's final thoughts and contact info.

💥 To grasp the potential regulatory developments and their implications on the crypto space, this episode is a must-listen. 🌈 Hit that 🛑 SUBSCRIBE button 🛑 and join our quest for insights that could revolutionize your understanding of the evolving digital finance ecosystem. 🌠

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

What's up everybody? Welcome back to the Havring Report podcast. The price of Bitcoin is about 36.5 thousand US dollars and there's only about 20 weeks left until the next Bitcoin having. Today we welcome Sanja Mehta, a co-founder of the first lightning integrated Bitcoin education app, onto the show. How's it going today?

Speaker 2: 0:19

Hey, brad, thanks for having me. It's going great, Very happy to be on.

Speaker 1: 0:23

I had recently interviewed Isaiah Jackson. I think that led us to cross past there to dive deeper down the Wiser app, as I spoke to him briefly about it. I'll definitely refer folks to that episode as well, because he's definitely a wealth of information and a Bitcoin OG in this space. But yeah, what do you make of the recent Bitcoin price bump that we've had?

Speaker 2: 0:39

I mean, I think it's great. It's obviously going to go way, way further than this, but of course, since the start of the year it's been a great jump, expecting it to hit a little higher before the year ends. But by the end of 2024, my price prediction is it's going to be double, if not more. So excited excited to see a kind of bull market starting and more people getting into the space and getting excited about the price.

Speaker 1: 1:00

So will this be your first bull market then it will.

Speaker 2: 1:03

Yeah, I actually got into Bitcoin right at the bottom, so hopefully things only get better from here. I think I've seen pretty much the worst, but very excited to be part of a bull run and just see the hype and the enthusiasm of everyone in the Bitcoin space when there's a bull market. I've heard a lot spoken to a lot of folks that have been part of another bull market. So excited to just be a part of one.

Speaker 1: 1:23

Yeah, bull markets are really fun. You get a lot of people coming out of the woodworks asking you about Bitcoin and people from high school maybe that you haven't spoken to in a long long time. Just everyone coming on and out and getting curious about Bitcoin and crypto. Fortunately, you do get a lot of people asking about other coins outside of Bitcoin. Another one that I get asked about is people like Ripple, xrp. People will ask me about that and I'll say, like didn't you go discover Bitcoin, ethereum, learn anything about the space, before just hearing from a friend that you want to go all in on this other cryptocurrency now? But you'll get all types of inquiries, I'm sure this bull market so shifting gears right into Weiser.

Speaker 1: 1:57

I've played with the app, I've gone in there and tested it, and it's certainly very interesting and seems very beneficial for many people in the community that may not be so inclined to dig into these long, long conversations or read the Bitcoin white paper. You guys have simplified the Bitcoin education process and made an incentivized version of it as well. Now is this Weiser geared toward children? Is it geared toward everybody, or what are your thoughts around that?

Speaker 2: 2:24

Weiser is actually kind of geared towards everyone. We don't have a very specific target audience and we do simplify a lot of the language, so it's also for first, for people whose first language is in English. Obviously, we want to reach a global market and show people that financial literacy is key. Right, we're not targeting specifically, like, 14 year olds, but we also have 14 year olds on our app, as well as 60 year olds on our app. It's really for anyone that wants to become financially independent. We're actually launching a personalization feature soon. It's on our roadmap, so that's going to be able to target very specific groups of people very efficiently. So, yeah, so once we have that feature on board, we'll be able to target certain classes that we think high schoolers might be interested in, or certain classes that even women might be interested in, and I think I think this is key for learning Bitcoin, to just make sure that it resonates. The right reasons resonate with the right people.

Speaker 1: 3:11

Yeah, it seems a little bit of a challenge to get outside that male dominated 25 to 45 year old. When I look at my metrics, it's always the same type of person that are coming into this space. Like how do you market or how do you educate people differently outside of that core group of people that traditionally are interested in Bitcoin?

Speaker 2: 3:30

I think that is still a challenge and I think a lot of Bitcoin educators in the space are trying to figure that out. But from my experience and for having been working on this for about a year now, I'd say that not to be stereotypical, but there's obviously a lot of things that women are more interested in, right? So it's Same. For me, when I got orange-pilled, it wasn't the technical parts of Bitcoin, it wasn't what is in a block, what is a hash rate, what are all these complicated terms. It wasn't that that interested me, although that's what orange-pilled my husband. For me, it was the social causes, humanitarian how listening to real Bitcoin stories about people in India, in Lebanon, in South America, in Africa, and how it's actually helped them that really resonated with me. And when I connected with more women in the space, it was the same thing. It's like they want to actually hear real life stories and how it's helped people, instead of just hearing about the tech and how great lightning is. So I think that's the differentiator between a lot of men and women. But then again, there's so many different groups within these groups and, yeah, you just have to kind of find what touches them and try to figure that out. So that's what we're doing with the personalization, but it's still something that's hard to crack.

Speaker 2: 4:33

That's why we need to, you know, to cross the millions and billions of people in the space. That's what we need to figure out how do you educate them and how do you get them interested? And there's so much. Obviously, there's always so many misconceptions about Bitcoin. So I think the first thing is just telling them that the media doesn't always portray Bitcoin the right way, and I think that's the right way to educate anyone new to the space, because you always get the same question saying okay, but isn't it a Ponzi scheme? Isn't it too volatile? Isn't it just another asset that goes up and down and, within a span of two days, 99% up and down, and that's what it's not right. So I think just breaking the fart and telling people that this is actually what Bitcoin is is the first step in educating them.

Speaker 1: 5:09

Definitely, and I guess I'm a little bit grateful when it comes to that, because I was attracted to not only the technical side of things but also the social and humanitarian efforts that it brings forth. I know you have an extensive background in marketing, but did you also? I see you studied politics, economics?

Speaker 2: 5:26

Yeah, so I actually studied sociology and work university and then I went on to do my masters at the London School of Economics. So my background is in the social sciences, did a bit of politics, economics, sociology, all of that. But yeah, I think maybe that's why resonate more with the social aspects as well. When you hear lines on the media, you hear someone say that like about 5 billion people live under authoritarian regimes. These are all people who live under either corrupt governments or hyperinflation, or the money system is just broken. And then you hear about a two like Bitcoin that can help them. It just hits. It's just something you want to go down the rabbit hole for and just figure out okay, how does it do that, how is it a solution? And then there's just no turning back after that.

Speaker 1: 6:06

Now why is there both being the first app built on the Lightning Network? I just want to ask you how does that work in terms of getting your Satoshi off the app for the end user? What does that look like for them?

Speaker 2: 6:15

We incentivize users with a few amounts of SAT so that they're that instant gratification once like makes them come back onto the app. So we have weekly monthly challenges. If they answer quizzes correctly, they win SATs. Basically, they can use an external wallet. We obviously recommend wallet of Satoshi or Breeze or any of these big ones. Eventually we may even create our own wallet it's all down the roadmap but basically they can just install a very easy, user friendly wallet and create an invoice and we just send the SATs to them. That's also being done automatically now, so it's quite a nice feature to have.

Speaker 2: 6:48

We're obviously not giving away like one or two whole Bitcoins. We're giving a few amount of SAT. It's something that really incentivizes users to come back to learn and yeah, and we've seen that, we've seen that in the past six months that we launched We've been public. It's something that just gets users excited. We also launched our first wiser games night where we gave around 500,000 SATs. We're actually hosting the live on Tuesday for that, like a live games night with the finals round, and it's not a lot of money if you think about it right, but it's just something rewarding and something it just makes you feel like you've won something and you've done well and you want to come back to the space and just it just makes you want to learn more, so it's a great feature to have for sure.

Speaker 1: 7:21

You're getting something rather than nothing. There's some sort of incentive there and, you know, for young people or just people starting out with their financial education. Is there any obstacles when it comes to hang minors, people that aren't over a certain age? Satoshi's over the internet like that.

Speaker 2: 7:38

No, we've not faced any issues as such. So we run our own node, where the technical developers are very experienced in this. They've been in the space for the past 10 years, so no issues at such. We've not faced any challenges. If anything, it just kind of incentivizes us to build more of our own infrastructure and figure this out, because it's been a very smooth process and I think the way Lightning is developing as well, it's just becoming easier and easier. Fees are becoming lower, transactions are becoming faster, so, if anything, the space is just advancing. It's not becoming more challenging at all.

Speaker 1: 8:08

My next question is you know where does the Bitcoin come from that is paid to your users, or what's your business model for Wiser?

Speaker 2: 8:14

Actually, you have three different business models. We basically have a freemium version as a subscription version, right? So on the freemium version, any user can download the app for free, access about 400 to 500 different classes. We're always pushing more content on the free app because that just aligns with our mission. We want financial literacy to be empowering and for that we want it to be free.

Speaker 2: 8:33

When you pay for the subscription, you're getting access to news bites where we're basically talking about news narratives in Bitcoin and the financial space and making them into bite-size classes. We release these once a week and the really nice part is that we do live Bitcoin classes as well. So if you pay for the subscription, you get access to, once in a week, life Bitcoin class with expert speakers in the space. So we've had some really great people come on. We've had Matteo from Orangeville app, we've had Alex from Spirit of Satoshi, we've had Arson from Relay, we've had a few different VCs, and our community just likes coming on to talk to these speakers and have a very free, flowing conversation. They can ask questions about Bitcoin, about how to start a business, how to get a job or something even more in the technical part of it. It's not a one-way conversation, it's really a whole community conversation. So that's something that we found that users find a lot of value in. So that's one of our business models.

Speaker 2: 9:21

The second one is we actually work with Bitcoin companies and do a lot of partnership placements. It's kind of in-app advertising, but we do a lot more like we partner with them long-term. We talk about their business and how it can help you, because now that we have a lot of user growth so WISER is crossed 13K followers, 13k users now. So when people want to advertise about their Bitcoin community, they would find our app a lot more useful than, say, a Facebook, because you have a highly targeted audience, an audience with high intent, and we use education as a funnel.

Speaker 2: 9:50

So when they're doing the first few classes, they learn about security and wallets. They want to know, okay, what is the wallet that I should get now? So they've kind of educated themselves on it. And then we push them to the wallet that we believe is the best and we kind of partner up with these wallets and Bitcoin only companies. So that's really interesting. And then the last one is using Bitcoin education as a service. So we're actually signing on our first schools and first institutions that we're working with, bitcoin or financial institutions or just schools in general that want to incorporate financial literacy into their program, and they can use our app to do this, because they found that the way we teach a community and we teach users is the way to learn today right, bidestice classes, gamification, social learning. So it is a much slower process, but that's kind of where we see a lot of user growth and a lot of interest coming in. It's kind of our B2B2C model.

Speaker 2: 10:38

There's a few different things we're working on. We might even launch another avenue of education or another product or service soon as well. It's all kind of in the works. But there's a lot of different ways that we can monetize with this and we're making enough to obviously reward the users with SAT cover a lot of our costs, so that's been really good yeah that's really good to hear.

Speaker 1: 10:55

Now, are there any limitations to jurisdictions? Like just for context, like I said, I'm in Canada here. Are there any limitations to Canadians or other nations worldwide?

Speaker 2: 11:04

No, there's no limitations. We're available on Android, on iOS, whatever. How many other countries in the world were available everywhere? So there's no limitations. We've not gotten any complaints so far.

Speaker 2: 11:14

Of course, there might be more restrictions if you want to use an external service like the wallet to withdraw your SATs, but we've not experienced anything so far. We've been pretty open. The only limitation we would say is languages, of course, because we've just launched in English. Right now, we realize that there's a lot of users who are requesting Spanish or French or Hindi, or a lot of countries in Africa, you know, wanting their own local languages as well, but that's something that just takes time and it's something we do want to implement. Like I said, we've only been live for six months, so there's a lot on the roadmap, a lot we want to do, but I would say for now, probably language is the highest limitation, because it's just when you're reaching a global audience. You want everyone to be on the app. Everyone is so interested and free financial literacy like why not, you know, if you're offering it in 20 different languages, it's just going to grow much bigger.

Speaker 1: 12:00

So where's your biggest user base at the current moment?

Speaker 2: 12:02

Right now it is the US, but again, we're not actively doing any advertising, so whatever we're getting is kind of organic through word of mouth. So we see the US being our biggest market, but then our second biggest is, like India and Nigeria. There's a lot of interest from the global south for sure. Eventually we want to launch ads because that's just the way to get eyes quicker on your app. I think the US is just always such a great market because people are so open to buying new products, learning new concepts. Europe is a little more conservative, but we've seen good growth in the UK as well. Canada has been good, australia has been good, but number one market US for sure.

Speaker 1: 12:34

Now, you mentioned earlier that guys aren't shy about recommending best wallets. Is there a certain brand of wallet that you guys recommend to your users for cold storage or just for using the Lightning network?

Speaker 2: 12:45

So we do get a lot of questions on this. I personally love wallet of Satoshi. I just believe that a wallet should have an easy user interface. Like we're onboarding a bunch of people who are very new to the space. They've just kind of educated themselves on what Bitcoin is, so it should be a very easy, greasy wallet to use. It shouldn't take you too many steps to just put in an invoice, get your SATs and be able to transfer it from the app to the wallet. So I personally love that one. I think there's a lot of great apps out there and there's so many coming in development as well. Like the space is just moving so fast. It's something that we'll keep an eye out for and keep changing and recommending if we feel that that's something better is coming up. But I just like the speed of transactions and how smooth the wallet goes, and this one is actually not even like a partner or sponsorship, it's just something that I personally love. So wallet of Satoshi's great.

Speaker 1: 13:30

Appreciate the recommendation. Now I also saw on the Weiser website that you guys have some merchandise that people can order. As you can see, I'm a big fan of Bitcoin merchandise here and showed it to my buddy, Pat Durham, for getting me this super cool Bitcoin hoodie.

Speaker 2: 13:45

I like it. It's really nice.

Speaker 1: 13:46

Yeah, thanks, yeah. So I just wanted to give an opportunity for folks to hear a little bit about your merchandise and I saw you guys have opportunity for free shipping.

Speaker 2: 13:54

The Weiser shop is something we kind of started more passionately Like, but it's just something we thought that, okay, people get interested in Bitcoin. Most people own merchandise in the space, right, we all have the socks or the hoodies or the caps or something and every time you go to a conference or you just wear it, you get some attention and some eyes on you and a conversation starts. So we've made them really fun t-shirts. They're always like a few memes or something funny. Like I said, it's not something we actively promote, but it's something that people do see. We have been getting sales. It's just an interesting side thing that we started and we had some fun creating the design and the whole team just got kind of into it. I think that was just more of a fun, creative side of our team that we did very passionately.

Speaker 1: 14:32

One of the t-shirts I like that you guys have on your website is the Michael Sailor quote. There is no second best with the meme on there I thought that one was pretty fun. But yeah, can you give us a sneak peek to anything new that you guys may be working on with Wiser or anything we can expect in the future?

Speaker 2: 14:47

So we just launched a gifting feature, which we thought was pretty cool, because we realized that when people get into the space, they go down the rabbit hole. They want to orange fill their friends, their family, their community right. It's always so difficult doing that when they're not educated. So there's a way. You can come onto our app. You can just give them a subscription. Just put in an email address, a name, and they'll get it for free, obviously because you paid for it. And they come onto the app and they get access to all the subscription, all the exclusive content, without having to pay anything. So it's just a fun feature again, a fun feature to have on the roadmap.

Speaker 2: 15:17

We have a lot coming on. We can't disclose too much because we're doing a lot of partnerships, but there is something exciting we're going to be doing with my primer Bitcoin. So they're the biggest educators in El Salvador. It's really interesting to work with them because they're the more on ground educators and where the digital educators right. So when you combine these two, you have a really strong force and hopefully we'll be able to get a lot more people on board with the collaboration like this. We're very, very excited for that. Yeah, like I was saying, I can't disclose too much, but at least in the three, four months, we're planning on kind of launching a collaboration with other companies, a side product, a side project. So all of that is in the works and then and then, like I was saying, languages and personalization is a big one just to try to be able to reach more people in different target group.

Speaker 2: 15:57

What we saw, something that was very interesting in the space is that there's this whole way you can teach about Bitcoin to like people who are interested in the yoga part or health part of just educating them, and there's this whole angle of Bitcoin, like teaching them financial literacy through the lens of Bitcoin. There's also this whole group of veterans where we're working with Gabe Lord. He's pretty big in the space as well, so he's going to be contributing content with that. We're getting a lot of specialized contributors who want to just create classes for us, because there's obviously a different way to teach different people and we might not be the best people to do that, but when you have someone in the inside doing that, it's the best way to get more people on board. So very exciting features coming up. A lot of games coming up. We had a Thanksgiving game. We're going to have another big one for Christmas. Very exciting way to just close the year and then, yeah, start with the bang in Jan 2024.

Speaker 1: 16:42

It should be a bang in year coming up, so it's all quite exciting. One question I'm thinking of when you're talking about having these game nights and everything like that, you know what's stopping, like a Bitcoin OG coming into the game show and just cleaning up all the Satoshi's.

Speaker 2: 16:56

I mean, they could we probably do have some of them doing it, but it's fun right. At the end of the day, you just want like passionate people, people who are just okay getting everything right but who also want to just be a part of the community. So we have like 10 finalists coming on on Tuesday. A lot of these people have been with us since the start. They are pretty big in the Bitcoin space, but it's just a nice way for for people to also get to know each other and to get a little social with each other on our app. And it's not like we're giving out like thousands and thousands of dollars or so many Bitcoin, but it's just a way to get people together and have a fun night and just test yourself on your Bitcoin knowledge. And you know, if we get a Michael Sailor on, why not? I think the community would love that. They'd love to just compete with him and see him on screen as well. So I don't think that's an issue or anything.

Speaker 1: 17:38

I guess we're going to jump it right into my couple of fun blitz questions here. Coffee or tea Coffee? What's the first crypto that comes to mind besides Bitcoin?

Speaker 2: 17:46

There is no second best.

Speaker 1: 17:48

We got a big Michael Sailor theme going on our show today. That's great. What do you do outside of Wiser Bitcoin education?

Speaker 2: 17:55

I love being active. I'm super into sports. I've actually been like a professional badminton player. I've tracked the ABC camp in Nepal, so just love to be on the go and find an activity to keep my mind and body on the go.

Speaker 1: 18:07

I'm going to open it up for you. If there's anything that we missed or that you want to touch upon on this episode, feel free. If not, maybe just let us know where we can follow you and learn more.

Speaker 2: 18:16

I definitely had a great time being on. I'm excited for the community to just learn more about Bitcoin education, check out Wiser, always open to feedback and just if there's anything you guys want to learn more about, happy to incorporate all of that. You can find me on Twitter. I'm quite active Sanjana underscore connect, and I'm on LinkedIn as well Sanjana Metta Active on both platforms, always looking to connect with more Bitcoiners. I think that's how I reached out to you as well Just one more people in this space and always happy to connect.

Speaker 1: 18:41

Thank you so much, Sanja.

Speaker 2: 18:42

Thank you. It was great being here, Brad. See you soon.